the other day I checked out techtv.com and found some stuff from eye drops in one of the animation lab things. in it they had some stuff about making translucent shaders. you know for stuff like leaves skin marble milk and other stuff.
so naturally I go to maya and try it out. I experimented for hours with the translucency attributes and no change in my objects at all.

How do you get translucency to work good.:surprised

Hey, just to clear things up this thread is about SSS effects and stuff.
I didn't really mean translucency in the thread title. I just called it that because I didn't know what it was really called.
and for some of you that doesn't know what this is. SSS stands for sub-surface scattering. you know. when light hits your surface some goes in and dances a jig and then bounces back out.
(I didn't know this kind of cool stuff existed like 3 days before I started this thread.)

GrafOrlok

03 March 2003, 09:23 PM

Maya handles translucency pretty simple: shine a light behind it and the light shines through. I think what you expected was some kind of sub-surface scattering, that is when light travels through the material and bounces back colors and light from within the material. It's quite possible to do with Mental ray, it just needs some clever shader-writing.
I think I have a link to a tut somewhere... hm, must have it at work... I'll be back.

Maya Ayanami

03 March 2003, 08:28 PM

yep... that is the thing I am talking about.
is it hard..

alexx

03 March 2003, 08:32 PM

pixho has a nice sss fake maya shader on his site (www.pixho.com)

check that out

cheers

alexx

stunndman

03 March 2003, 08:57 PM

the images in maya's documentation on translucence look pretty decent - i guess it depends on what kind of translucent material you are trying to achieve

and there's a sss simulation (fake) tutorial for mental-ray on the net

jeremybirn

03 March 2003, 01:26 AM

"the images in maya's documentation on translucence look pretty decent - i guess it depends on what kind of translucent material you are trying to achieve"

It had better be a thin surface, like a leaf, paper, or lampshade. Notice how the docs only show sample images of leaves (thin surfaces) but claim in the text that translucency depth and focus can carry light though things like styrofoam balls, etc.? The reality is, the translucency function in Maya is "broken" for non-thin surfaces, and on thicker objects like spheres the function can't really allow any of the light to carry through the surface correctly. If you try what they say in the docs, you'll be dissappointed. That's why the text goes further than the sample images - the poarameters are there, but the functions don't actually work.

"and there's a sss simulation (fake) tutorial for mental-ray on the net"

Again, disappointing. Most of the tutorials on sss describe how to make things like smokey glass, things that are more like modified transparency than sss as seen in marble, wax, human skin, milk, etc.

-jeremy

Maya Ayanami

03 March 2003, 08:39 PM

do any of you know about a mental ray shader type thing in mental. see pic. first red circle. ignore the other.
http://www.motiondesign.biz/items/v_9_img.jpg

Maya Ayanami

03 March 2003, 09:00 PM

Could you use a volume shader to achive an SSS effect.

jeremybirn

03 March 2003, 09:07 PM

There have been some recent threads about DGS on highend3d, including:
http://www.highend3d.com/boards/showflat.php?Cat=1,2&Board=MayaMR&Number=138672&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=0&fpart=
and some other threads about problems with shadows on DGS, etc.

A good photon volume shader could certainly be a way to write a SSS shader for Mental Ray.

-jeremy

GrafOrlok

03 March 2003, 10:22 PM

The tut I mentioned was probably the same as Jeremy dizzed. It's mainly colored smoked glass type of things. However here's the link:
http://www.motiondesign.biz/

Haven't tried it myself though. Thought I'd do it when things quiet down here at work. My main goal is making a really stunning translucent skin texture. Guess I'll just have to keep looking then:cry:

Atwooki

03 March 2003, 01:02 AM

I read somewhere that the maya implementation of translucency requires that transparency be set to a non-zero number
(ie. 0.001) in the common attributes of the material, before the translucency effect works....
Works for me!
Also the SSS script update from pixho.com is DEFINITELY worth putting to use...

ATWOOKI

yinako

03 March 2003, 04:25 PM

I think the reason why its hard to do SSS is because different material behave differently based on their material made from.

For example theres marble tranclucency, that along have variation of of SSS depending on the quality of marble.

Thats why A|W's made its own shader for skin, its mostly improved for translucency.

It depents what matrial you focus on, if you are an artist and dont have a greate since of direction yet, then its hard to come up with one, just by playing around shader nodes.

On the otherhand if you intend to achieve a certain SSS effect for a particular material, say you really like the Marble shader in siggraph few years back, then just have a look around the net for their papers, how they do it and try mimic the same with shaders in maya, look for the way they handel lights and interpret shading effects.

Its always easy if you know exactly what you want.

jeremybirn

03 March 2003, 05:48 PM

"Its always easy if you know exactly what you want."

I know a lot of R&D people who don't find this easy, and you're the first person I've met who's suggested that it was easy for you. Where do you work? Can you share your results?

I'd like human skin, and I have lots of reference images of exactly what I want, and how the shading should work on the bottom of someone's nose where the light is cast through the cartilage and adding a warm reddish glow to the nose interior and pink fill cast into part of the shadow area underneath. Now, will it be easy? Or is translucency completely broken the moment you turn on shadows or use complex geometry? Can you even get the SS color you want to appear on the bottom of the nose?

-jeremy

playmesumch00ns

03 March 2003, 11:23 PM

Originally posted by jeremybirn
"Its always easy if you know exactly what you want."

I know a lot of R&D people who don't find this easy, and you're the first person I've met who's suggested that it was easy for you. Where do you work? Can you share your results?

I'd like human skin, and I have lots of reference images of exactly what I want, and how the shading should work on the bottom of someone's nose where the light is cast through the cartilage and adding a warm reddish glow to the nose interior and pink fill cast into part of the shadow area underneath. Now, will it be easy? Or is translucency completely broken the moment you turn on shadows or use complex geometry? Can you even get the SS color you want to appear on the bottom of the nose?

-jeremy

Too bloody true Jeremy:applause:

yinako

03 March 2003, 05:03 PM

I dont work for any studio.

I was suggestion its easier if you have refence to wrok from, still I know its difficult to come up with a general SSS solution.

I'll say for maya rendering, and doing skin stuff, you can get good results by connecting shaders. Some suggestion would be using forward scatter in ramp shader(skins have a higher foward scatter), and use facing ratio to drive Foward scatter and translucent attributes to mimic pinkish colors on the out side.

pixho

03 March 2003, 10:07 PM

Hi,

can you post some examples of your work??

As you said, it's maybe easy to get an overall translucent look for simple shapes, but as Jeremy mentionned, it's very difficult to get exactly translucence where you want it to be.

Besides, Maya's translucence is not that easy to manage with default settings. You need to get into some shading networks to get something reliable.
Morevover, as (again) Jeremy said, the shadows are quite a part of the result.
You really have to set them carefully to get a correct look.

Regarding my experience, I now ask the texture artists to make translucent masks for the part that would need it (on a human head), like the nostrils, lips (a bit) and the ears.
This make easier the process to get proper translucence where exactly you want and not seeing light flooding all over your model.

But this is not all. Like (and this is the last time!! ;-)), Jeremy said, using translucence will not give you a good skin look.
It'll simply make the material look like wax!
You need to fake the light subscattering, when light gets through the skin, the response of the dermis gives a reddish tint to your model.
I'm pretty sure that you have your own way of doing it (I have my own too ;)).

Last thing (still regarding skin shader), is to get rid of the lambertian illumination model with bump.
People (I don't talk about R&D and advanced skin layer based shaders) and some texture artists I work with, are used to set a very little amount of bump. Not because of their maps (unbelievebly realistic), but just because of the model of illumination. Look at you in a mirror, look at your skin, look at your specularity, look at how the fat (sebum) alter the look of your wrinkles (if you have some ;)), the grain of your skin, and tell me if a lambert (blinn, or whatever default maya's material) will give you the same soft, organic look.

To illustrate my words, have a look on Henrik Jensen's subScattering render (the 2 heads modeled by Steven).
The response of the skin with light, specularity and bump is very well rendered (but how Henrik did it is beyond my understanding ;0)

All this to say there are always solutions to get very convincing results ;)

Good night to all

Emmanuel

Maya Ayanami

03 March 2003, 10:59 PM

damm. reallistic skin shaders are so hard it is upsetting. I tried out A|W's skin shader plug-in the other day and it sucked. I hated the look. although you cant get much better with Maya's default renderer.
are there any default mental ray shaders that could be of any use. there are a shit load of them(excuse my english). I dont know this is really hard.

and with the showing of my work.
I dont really have any renders dealling with translucency or SSS for now. Im mostly into modeling right now. - Me must get good. I suck at almost anything rightnow. I am best at turning on FG and GI and waiting for my renders to go through. not very good since I've been about 17 months since I picked up 3D.

HaHa and Maya won an oscar. Im so proud.

Maya Ayanami

03 March 2003, 11:01 PM

Hi,

can you post some examples of your work??

what kind-o-work do u want me to post. I can make some if you want.

playmesumch00ns

03 March 2003, 09:53 AM

Originally posted by Maya Ayanami
damm. reallistic skin shaders are so hard it is upsetting. I tried out A|W's skin shader plug-in the other day and it sucked. I hated the look. although you cant get much better with Maya's default renderer.
are there any default mental ray shaders that could be of any use. there are a shit load of them(excuse my english). I dont know this is really hard.

and with the showing of my work.
I dont really have any renders dealling with translucency or SSS for now. Im mostly into modeling right now. - Me must get good. I suck at almost anything rightnow. I am best at turning on FG and GI and waiting for my renders to go through. not very good since I've been about 17 months since I picked up 3D.

HaHa and Maya won an oscar. Im so proud.

Best solution for the moment is to use the technique pixho described. The trouble with doing something like skin is that there's no unique solution (at the moment). As jeremy already mentioned (!):) , you set it up in one kind of light to look great, but then it breaks as soon as you change the lighting setup. I think it can't be long before someone implements Jensen's technique as a plug-in or shader (I think a lot of R&D departments are going to be looking at exactly that problem before next summer), but until then it's just a case of making something that looks good on a case-by-case basis. Get a mirror and get used to staring at your own reflection!:)

GrafOrlok

03 March 2003, 10:14 AM

I also think we'll see more realistic skin shading in the near future. I think what Weta did with Gollum really made people aware of SSS. I still can't grasp how they managed... It's so good. Maybe a bit too translucent, but still, sooo good!

Maya Ayanami

03 March 2003, 06:50 PM

i dont have any expirence with volume shaders and photon shaders and any of the other mental default shaders. but could i possible use a combination with one of these and a normal shader or something.

and you prabably have seen what A|W's skin plugin looks like.
for some reason I just dont like it. is that the same for you.

playmesumch00ns

03 March 2003, 09:52 PM

AFAIK Maya's skin shader is based on the Kubelka-Munk methods described in one of the Siggraph Renderman Course Notes, same as the Skin shader that comes with RAT. I've got some reasonable results with it but it just seems a bit fiddly for my liking.

The trouble with skin is that it's not translucent like a leaf or a candle is translucent. Light entering the skin is blocked by the bone before it can go right through to the other side (except where there's no bone, e.g. the ear), so what's important for the look of skin is the sub-surface multi-scattering: where a photon enters the skin, bounces around a bit changin its colour and intensity, then leaves the skin in a different place. Theoretically this is not that hard to do. The difficult bit comes in getting it to render reasonably quickly. I think for the time being the best bet is to go with a method like pixho described.

bambam

03 March 2003, 07:31 PM

make sure you check out the tutorial by steve

http://www.androidblues.com/shadetut.html

Maya Ayanami

03 March 2003, 08:17 PM

cool!
thanks for the url.

yinako

03 March 2003, 01:39 AM

To illustrate my words, have a look on Henrik Jensen's subScattering render (the 2 heads modeled by Steven).
The response of the skin with light, specularity and bump is very well rendered (but how Henrik did it is beyond my understanding ;0)

Oh that one, you can only do so much with with regular scanline renders, Henrik Jensen uses photon mapping...but dont expect fast results or any thing close to realtime. The one used in Maya is still lambert, although not as accurate but its a good trade off for speed.

When it came time for rendering, van Den Bragt used Mental Ray and a sub surface scattering technique, which gave the image depth. The illusion of real light fall-off over the model was achieved using layers such a peach fur pass.

The final animation was then undertaken by van Den Bragt and Koji Morihiro using Maya. Once that was complete, all the CG passes were composited and finessed in Flame by Mill Flame artist Justin Bromley.
From http://www.animationmagazine.net/commercial/3_27_03.html

-jeremy

Maya Ayanami

03 March 2003, 06:44 PM

damm.
that is really something.
what they used Maya
do u know if they used Maya's default shader or other nodes.
or did they just create there own.

stunndman

03 March 2003, 07:16 PM

why don't you just read the article

Maya Ayanami

03 March 2003, 08:58 PM

why does it say exactly what they did or something.

stunndman

03 March 2003, 09:16 PM

...Den Bragt used Mental Ray and a sub surface scattering technique, which gave the image depth.

is that what you are looking for ?

GrafOrlok

03 March 2003, 10:26 PM

I don't know how much it shows, but I did a little test with the transparency set to 0.001 and then I fiddled around with the translucency settings. This is a WIP and it is not finished, so don't judge me on it. :pThere's still much to do...
http://www.swedecreations.com/CGart/TranslucenceTest.jpg
Before it looked pretty solid and not very alive. The only thing that really bothers me is that all shadows are pretty subtle with this method. I do think however it shows that under certain conditions it might work. It's not SSS, but it still looks pretty good in my opinion.

tripNfall

03 March 2003, 11:18 PM

Wow, Graf Orlok that's a wonderful image.
I was just thinking of playing with a little
transparency for skin.

It would be great if you could post your
shader info. Also, if you could share how
you created all the differnt texture maps
that make up your shader.

Is this the Maya render or mr?

Thanks,
ds

stunndman

03 March 2003, 01:46 AM

Is this the Maya render or mr?

or a photo?

ceql

03 March 2003, 05:45 AM

Yea, only the eyeball part of it is 3D :p

[Edit: Btw, interesting thread! :applause:]

GrafOrlok

03 March 2003, 09:57 AM

Quite true ceql. The skin-part is a photo texture on corresponding geometry, becase I needed it to be done very fast for a short I did for a friend a couple of weeks ago. But the skin didn't really work satisfying, being all that opaque, so I figured it would be a good thing to try out some shading tests on... And messing with the translucency really made some difference.

I'll keep on working on it.

playmesumch00ns

03 March 2003, 07:14 PM

Originally posted by Maya Ayanami
damm.
that is really something.
what they used Maya
do u know if they used Maya's default shader or other nodes.
or did they just create there own.

Haven't been able to watch the Making Of thingy (Damn 56K!), but from the article I'm guessing they they wrote a mentalray shader to do this.

GrafOrlok

03 March 2003, 10:25 PM

or a photo?
Let me elaborate on that for a moment... I come from the physical part of the movie effects business. I've been working for 9 years sculpting and painting stuff like plastic and foam rubber to look like real-life materials. When it comes to skin it's always been a challenge because often you use opaque materials, like foam rubber, and you try to make them look translucent. What you do is painting the shadows and the highlights that occur when lights goes into the material, as well as adding reds, purples and yellows to fake SSS. That is pretty much like duplicating a photo.

I could have done it all in Photoshop, but there was no time. Besides, here we have this wonderful tool that allows us to use photos so why not. The downside is that there is already shadows and highlights in the photo and you don't have the freedom of placing lights and shadows as you please. But the thing is that the subsurface scattering is already there. So, my idea was that this might be a way to fake sss by having it in the texture, either by painting it or by using photo's, and then use the translucency to make it absorb lights and shadows. I am sure I can make it look better with the help of Steven's skin tutorial and I might even let A/W's skin shader have a second go. The only problem is the shadows. It seems to be pretty much gone as soon as you turn on translucency.

This thread is great! I really hope it leads to people trying to push the boundarys of Maya's renderer by doing workarounds instead of just sitting waiting for that "render realistic skin"-button;) . I know I'll do my best:beer:

Maya Ayanami

03 March 2003, 06:34 PM

Ya jeese it would be nice if there was a render realistic looking skin button, that would surely lenghten our lives without all of that stress and whatnot.
when simulating sss do they use a surface shader or a volume shader. I think that it would be easier to use something that "fills it up" because well isn't that what your skin is like, a volume type of thing. but I guess that it isn't as easy as I think because if it was we wouldn't be talking about how insanly hard it is to create a material with realistic SSS(well you can use a photo but you dont have much control over it).
Did these people do a volume shader aproach. what is a volume shader do any ways. could you put some transparency on a volume shader and (if the material has stripes or something) see the whatevers going through.

I dont have much experience with volume shaders and absolutely none with menat volume because whenever I try and render Maya just closes.
it is just by the name of it seems like this is the kind of thing that it would do.

p.s.
are all of you maya users or are some of you some other software user.

and is there all of a sudden after march 1st have there been more people posting threads say "hi i have been using ????? for X years and am new to maya" or is it just myself playing tricks on myself.

Maya Ayanami

03 March 2003, 06:36 PM

by the way, Graf Orlok, could you posibly do another render with your eye but with a bit brighter lights.
I could barely see any thing. like only the highlights in the eye.
and nice job. I can see the skin a bit.

and well I am sure that all of you have seen them.
arent those two pics that one guy did. they are they one of that marble statue and the close up on some girls lips. with the streached bump map. well if you know what my confused words mean and you have seen these pictures then you might agree when I say "holly shit. those are well somthin great". those are really nice especially on the statue. I still think that it may be a realy pic. damm. why is it sooo hard.

Waters

03 March 2003, 10:50 PM

Hey, I love the subject of this chat, I have been experimenting in the same area, I put in many hours trying to put together a good sss fake, I want a realistic skin shader. I tried using the mel script on pixho, but I cant get it to work, and the documentation on the site doesnt go to greatly into details. I placed the mel in my scripts folder, and typed source ****.mel and executed the script while I had my material and lights selected.. and... nothing. Can someone who has used this script sucessfully give me some advice, Id really like to try it out. Also, anyone know how I might impliment a mental ray shader. I have seen some great ones coded for XSI, which also uses mental ray, using a phone shader and a volume shader (they called volume effects), shouldnt it be possible to feed something more or less the same to mental ray without writing a maya shader at all? Please respond to one of my questions. Thanks.

jeremybirn

03 March 2003, 11:02 PM

Some people have been lumping together two unrelated issues:

1. Yes, there are tons of things people can do to partially make-up for the deficiencies of the Maya renderer like the broken translucency function and lack of SSS:
*Stacking two shadow mapped lights together, one with a bigger dmap filter size than the other, to build red-edged shadows.
*Carefully tinted fill lighting to warm up shadow areas
*painting thinness maps and rendering multiple passes that try to fill in your shadow areas with the right tones
*adding enough fur and bump mapping to help your light "wrap around" your model more realistically
...and other things mentioned above.

2. Still, it stinks that Maya's translucency function has been broken for several versions and fails to operate on non-thin surfaces in renders with correct shadowing. It seems very shortsighted that you can't map the translucence or even set its color. While other renderers like Brazil are giving users full Sub-surface Scattering capabilities, Maya hasn't even got basic non-scattered forward translucency fixed yet, and even Mental Ray doesn't have SSS support (unless a studio writes it's own solution) like Brazil.

These are real problems that visibly hurt people's work. It should not be implied that people pointing out the bugs in current translucence and lack of modern SSS are just being lazy or uncreative or looking for push-button solutions when citing these serious limitations of the software, we really need more tools and options here (like SSS), as well and fixes and controls added to the tools that exist.

-jeremy

Maya Ayanami

04 April 2003, 03:44 AM

I didnt know that the brazil render had an sss fuction built in.(did I read your statement correctly)
have you seen some of the results from this. hey maybe you can post up some pics if you can find them. that would be cool. it would be nice seeing the output of other renderers.
and doesn't pixar have it incorporated into their renderman renderer.

how realistic do those renders look like.
are they
ok
fine
good
so insanly awsome that my head will blow up.:bounce:

Waters

04 April 2003, 04:54 AM

hmm.. thatd be nice, give us some rendered examples of pixar's approach to translucence and skin shading.

Anyone have any translucence examples they can post?
Could someone who has gotten the pixho shader for maya to work post a render using it?

Stahlberg

04 April 2003, 05:45 AM

Couldn't agree more with Jeremy, in fact every time I start thinking about this mess, how long I've been wanting to do proper SSS, and then seeing other apps do it but not mine, I could throw a tantrum. :)

I could never get pixho's translucency to work either. I worked with Henrik Wann-Jensen, the closeup of the lips is my model, but he never continued his work into anything that could be used by off-the-shelf software. Mark Davies (Raydiffuse) was working on something that might have given SSS to Maya, but that list has been dead for weeks now. (I hope he's ok.)
It seems SSS in Maya just isn't meant to be. :) Not GI either if all you have is the standard renderer...

jeremybirn

04 April 2003, 06:24 AM

There are a lot of examples of Brazil renderings on-line, some SSS demo images are on sputterfish's own site:
http://www.splutterfish.com/sf/sf_gen_page.php3?page=FeatureGalleries/Illumination
There are more examples with SSS if you look through the user's work, all interesting images you couldn't produce with maya.

Programmable renderers such as Mental Ray and PRMan certainly can have different SSS implementations written for them. Getting something shipping in off-the-shelf packages would be a welcomed addition to some of these IMHO.

Some more SSS Images:
http://www.cgfocus.com/articles/subsurfacescattering/a2-Milk.jpg

And the mouth image described above:
http://graphics.stanford.edu/~henrik/papers/bssrdf/

-jeremy

GrafOrlok

04 April 2003, 09:42 AM

It should not be implied that people pointing out the bugs in current translucence and lack of modern SSS are just being lazy or uncreative or looking for push-button solutions when citing these serious limitations of the software
I'm sorry Jeremy, I didn't by any means want to imply that people are lazy or uncreative. In fact I was trying to show the opposite...

You are absolutely right. This is without a doubt very serious limitations in Maya and should NOT be blamed on anything else.

That is probably also why this thread has become quite popular too...:beer:

jeremybirn

04 April 2003, 12:28 PM

Originally posted by Stahlberg
I worked with Henrik Wann-Jensen, the closeup of the lips is my model, but he never continued his work into anything that could be used by off-the-shelf software.

This is all based on my understanding, but Jensen has done alot of useful things here, but he has also been burned personally during his efforts to bring us new tools in commercial products. Jensen is the inventor of Photon Mapping, variants of which can be used for global illumination, caustics, and sub-surface scattering. After publishing his first paper on Photon Mapping, and sharing those results for caustics and GI with a lot of scientists and developers at SIGGRAPH, he later went to work for Mental Images on adding global illumination and caustic support to Mental Ray. Mental Images tried to act as though they owned everything he had done in his life, and even went to the rediculous length of claiming that they owned a trademark on the phrase "Photon Mapping" which he had coined in his initial publication. After he left Mental Images, both Jensen and Mental Images each submitted paper proposals to SIGGRAPH to show their latest research on photon mapping, and when MI's paper was rejected, MI threatened to sue both Jensen and SIGGRAPH if they let Jensen present his paper. It wasn't until the next year that he presented his paper on implemented photon mapped caustics into raytracers... anyway, with all the bad blood between them, it's not really surprising that Jensen's more recent work on using photon mapping for sub-surface scattering hasn't been quickly implemented over at mental images. I included a link above, but anyone reading this thread who hasn't checked out all the work on Henrik Wann-Jensen's website should read through it at:
http://graphics.stanford.edu/~henrik/

And don't miss this animation, it has just about everything that needs to be implemented for a production solution to BSSRDF:
http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/animations/fast_bssrdf.avi

(Ps, I'm gonna finally get around to buying your book next week, Jeremy, hooray! :bounce: )

[Edit: That is, the Digital Lighting and Rendering book :p)

Waters

04 April 2003, 06:47 PM

This information is great, keep it coming guys. The rendering of Stahlberg's face/lips model is great, I have seen it before, but I am still impressed with it. Looks like he is on the right track for correctly simulating the look of real skin. I am a physics and 3d animation student, looks like I should learn to really program, and maybe I could lend my hand to this problem.

pixho

04 April 2003, 09:00 PM

Hi guys,

Here is a little render of SSS fake I've done last year when I was working on a skin shader (blinn based)

I didn't use Maya's translucence (nor my sss script) to get that render. Just 1 light!!

Emmanuel

http://www.3dluvr.com/pixho/tmp/skin/sss_fake_old.jpg
or http://www.3dluvr.com/pixho/tmp/skin/sss_fake_old.jpg

GrafOrlok

04 April 2003, 09:22 PM

Um... one word Emmanuel:
Wow:drool:
Want to share your secrets? That is absolutely amazing for being done in Maya. That's just what I've been trying to do, but never managed!

Jeremy:
I'm familiar with the breath taking job of Henrik Wann-Jensen, but I had never seen that film. It's truly amazing. Let's hope he'll resume his work. We really need that man. Here. Now.
:eek:

Maya Ayanami

04 April 2003, 09:46 PM

damm, I had no idea that the creators of the mental ray renderer could be such asses, trying to steel that guys work even after he had published his own paper on this stuff. that is quite stupid. and I got a chance to look at some of the output from the brazil render. and all i can say is wow.
i liked that one with the hand on the front page. nice.
damm now I am mad at mental images because they were trying to steel someone elses hard work and threatend to sue Jensen for all of his hard work. and now they are paying for it because they now dont know how to integrate sss into their renderers.

Does anyone know if they are making brazil for maya that would be nice.
and on Jensen's site. is that animation of the marble statue start at no sss or very little and go to more or a deeper sss.
it is kinda weird that this is causeing so many headaches. it doesnt seem like faking sss would be very hard.

and on the splutterFish download page - is that pic real or cg. if it is cg DAMM that is good.

What is the brazil public test like. does it have sss GI and radiostity, what restrictions does it have.
I couldn't find it on their site.

(Ps, I'm gonna finally get around to buying your book next week, Jeremy, hooray! :bounce: )

which book is that.

is Jeremy the guy who wrote those 2 [digital] books. if so nice job man. I am half way through the linghting and render book. and I will be starting on the painting and texturing book soon. I fliped through it and I saw some very interesting and most likely helpfull stuff.

Hey and Pixho that is a nice mouth sss mouth.
tell us what kind of render nodes you used. did you make your own.
you did a very good job. well as far as I can see.
post up a render with just a standard shader see that we can see the difference better.
awsome.

bambam

04 April 2003, 10:46 PM

Hi all

I thought you all might be interested in seeing some images of what Mark Davies was working on ...his sss shader for Maya
these are some test images i did a short while back
Mark gave me permission to show these

Don't know what happend to this shader Marks been very quiet as of lately
I share Steve S. thoughts as to ...hope he is OK

http://home.attbi.com/~tstoeger/machines/pages/bikeNsnow1.html

jeremybirn

04 April 2003, 10:57 PM

Emmanuel -
Nice work! I've admired for years what you manage to do in Maya's Hypershade, and all the work you have at pixho.com. Give some people lemons, they make lemonade.

Maya Ayanami -
Thanks, but I only wrote 1 of those: "Digital Lighting & Rendering" - the other 'digital...' books from my publisher are all different books written by different authors at different times.

Also to Maya Ayanami -
Sputterfish has said that they want to make a renderman-compliant version of Brazil, which would mean that you could use it with Maya (without going through Max...grrr...)

-jeremy

jeremybirn

04 April 2003, 11:08 PM

" I'm familiar with the breath taking job of Henrik Wann-Jensen, but I had never seen that film. It's truly amazing. Let's hope he'll resume his work. We really need that man. Here. Now."

Graf Orlok -
Jensen is continuing his research work, producing a lot of useful new innovations each year (just keep visiting his website...), and even working with a few production companies. He's apparently 100% done working with mental images, though, as of a few years ago, and I haven't heard of him going to work at any other commercial software companies.

But, there are other programmers at MI, and other renderers, that can all support these features and product-ise ideas that he and other researcher s initially develop. I'm pretty excited about how some of this stuff looks in other renderers like Brazil already, and we just need to wait for Brazil skin shading as shown below to "trickle up" to Maya.

http://www.3dluvr.com/ic-art/html/images/personal/brazil_skin_2.jpg

-jeremy

Waters

04 April 2003, 11:22 PM

I'd just like to react and say that.. Jensen is the MAN. I had not been on his site before coming to this thread, and I am blown away. And not just by the translucence, which is amazing, but by just about everything on there, especially the smoke renderings.
I appluad his work: :applause:

Kabab

04 April 2003, 04:58 AM

Wouldn't pixho solution for faking SSS be the best in reality ?Photon based stuff looks great but i bet its going to be a shit load slower then the blinn shader with one light that pixho came up with and the end result is very good.

Waters

04 April 2003, 05:24 AM

Have you used the shader/script (pixho) and gotten results? If so, can you post an example?

( I dont know about the results really being on the same level, just based on what I've seen )

Kabab

04 April 2003, 09:18 AM

Originally posted by Waters
Have you used the shader/script (pixho) and gotten results? If so, can you post an example?

( I dont know about the results really being on the same level, just based on what I've seen )
No i haven't used it myself but i was more trying to say is it really necessary to do it with photon maps if you can achieve a smiliar effect with good shaders which render much faster ?

Maya Ayanami

04 April 2003, 06:32 PM

Originally posted by jeremybirn
Emmanuel -
Nice work! I've admired for years what you manage to do in Maya's Hypershade, and all the work you have at pixho.com. Give some people lemons, they make lemonade.

Maya Ayanami -
Thanks, but I only wrote 1 of those: "Digital Lighting & Rendering" - the other 'digital...' books from my publisher are all different books written by different authors at different times.

Also to Maya Ayanami -
Sputterfish has said that they want to make a renderman-compliant version of Brazil, which would mean that you could use it with Maya (without going through Max...grrr...)

-jeremy

Well I really like your book. I is cool because it talks a lot about color scemes and even real life camera techniques and terms. and it isn't software specific so it is helpful to everyone that owns a 3D software pakage that is capable of rendering.

with sputterfish, brazil, and renderman. does make a renderman compliant version of brazil mean brazil is going to be a plugin or a standalone that hooks up with renderman. Ha, and I share your pane of having to go through max. I havent gone through max specifically but it is sure a pane to transfere you stuff to different software esspecily if you have things that maya has but not in the other. and it would most likely be difficult to do the cross over with character animations with skeletons and all.

I am working on an sss shader as well. but it might take a while for me to post my most likely poor results up because I want it to be on a nicely modelded head witch I just stared yesterday and this is my first real modeling job.
did I mention that your shader kicks ass Emmanuel.
I reall liked that snow and ice pic that bambam posted

jeremybirn

04 April 2003, 06:40 PM

Here's an analogy: Suppose Maya's lights couldn't cast shadows. There would still be a million ways creative users could post nice images here, showing shadows simulated with negative lights, shadow shapes projected from lights, shadows simulated through shaders or texture mapping, shadows modeled as flattened polygon shapes, shadows comped into the render, and so on - all of these techniques would be quicker than implementing dmap or raytraced shadows into the lights, but none would be as useful or robust a solution.

Nobody said that SSS had to be done through Photon Mapping. There are a number of approaches that could be taken in developing SSS solutions, and all production approaches would be to some extent a "fake" in the sense of being a deterministic simulation with an adjustable accuracy designed to only calculate what really needed to be shown. The important part is that a SSS solution needs to be robust and versatile enough to respond to different kinds of lighting, shadows, geometry, and animation.

-jeremy

Waters

04 April 2003, 08:43 PM

Well put Jeremy.

jeremybirn

04 April 2003, 03:52 AM

"does make a renderman compliant version of brazil mean brazil is going to be a plugin or a standalone that hooks up with renderman."

Don't confuse all "Renderman compliant" renderers with the specific commercial software product "Pixar's Photorealistic Renderman" (or PRMan.) PRMan is one renderer, sold by Pixar, but you don't need to own or use the PRMan renderer in order to use another "Renderman compliant" renderer.

"Renderman compliant" just means rendering scenes as described in a .rib file and following other Renderman standards and conventions originally set by Pixar. Pixar developed this standard with the idea that a .rib file would be a standard 3D scene description format for scenes to render, just like .eps is for pages to print. A number of renderers now follow those standards. This means once Brazil's developer Sputterfish gives Brazil the ability to work off of .rib files, people could use different animation software and different converters to make the .rib files, and the Brazil renderer would be able to render your scene, without going through or connecting to anything else.

-jeremy

Maya Ayanami

04 April 2003, 04:05 AM

CGtalk is such a great place. it is amaizing how much you can learn.

I totally agree with you there jeremybirn. I never really thought of faking a good sss it isn't nessesary just as long as it looks good. a faked non photon mapping sss shader would be the best aproach. with all these people trying to figure out a way to create true sss that makes it so that the artist can push a button and wait a few hours and out comes a nice render of some whoever. this is actually not a very way of going about doing this type of thing. say, just imagine how much longer it would take to render out an entire animation or even a whole movie. or even a movie like final fantasy. that would take forever. with a project like this just adding 1 small little minute to each frame would end up being many days weeks or maybe even months of extra rendering. but using a photon mapped aproach would add much much more than 1 minute to each frame. therefor this would be an illogical aproach to more realistic skin shaders. although true sss(not exactly true) will be more realistic and more acurate that a faked sss shader a well done faked shader would not look much diferent and would take an extreame less amount of render time making it usable in real life production schedules and timelines. A photon mapped aproach would be truely impossible for long animations it is only helpfull to use this on a still shot or maybe a short animation like a 10 sec. comercial but people would most likely stick with the fakey.

faked SSS is better than no SSS

Kabab

04 April 2003, 04:22 AM

The way i see it we are trying to FAKE reality not SIMULATE reality wich makes a big difference on how you apporach this stuff. If you need to simulate reality then i supose you can live with big render times etc to get the perfect result but if you just want something to look real enough to trick people its probably not worth simulating it if a fake looks 99% as good as is much faster.

Maya Ayanami

04 April 2003, 05:20 AM

you are absolutely right.
I couldn't agree with you more Kabab. you worded it much better than me.
a good faked shader is deffinatly the way to go.

Waters

04 April 2003, 03:52 PM

Well, in almost every way, what we do in 3d animation is a 'fake' for reality. We do what we have to, to create a believable world for the audience, not necessarily photorealistic. The point is that there is a demand for a versatile tool that allows artists to create a believable real world effect, that works in many different situations, without putting in too much work, and most 'sss fake' shaders, built within commercial packages, require both too much time to build, and do not work in many different situations. Jeremey is right on with the shadow analogy. Imagine if you had to right special shaders every time you needed a shadow in your scene, the point is how good it might look in the end, but how much it will slow down the artistic process. We should not put ourselves down as artists, and assume it is laziness to want a push button approach, why shouldn't I be able to create a translucence node and attach it to my surface quickly and easy? The whole process is a fake to begin with, the point is not the hours I spend, and the difficulty of the creation, it is the look of the final product. The software is just not keeping up with the demand.

jeremybirn

04 April 2003, 07:47 PM

It would be terrible if rendering realistic skin became yet another computational expense like realistic hair and realistic cloth sim that made productions add more computers. Realistic skin ought to be MUCH FASTER per frame than hair, and take much less time to compute than cloth, and it can be.

But, A|W's last attempt at a 'good fake' was when they wrote that 'Skin shader' for Maya, and I think we all agree that it was leaning too far towards the "fake" side and away from the "good" side.

There's an irony here. Leaning more towards 'fake' side seems to be the overall bias of the Maya renderer. The ironic thing is that all the cheats and hacks and shortcuts seem to catch up to users rendering complex animated projects with it, and then when users on a deadline try to fix the undesirable mistakes, glitches, and artifacts, they turn up all the quality-related parameters to the max, and it ends up being frustratingly slow.

Production-speed rendering is certainly a user requirement for the missing translucency controls, but the main priority is making a versatile, stable, robust, flexible, controllable tool in the first place. We don't need a shader that's another quicky hack we could have come up with ourselves in hypershade.

-jeremy

Ronald

04 April 2003, 09:10 AM

this is so true. and i think this is also the reason, why they are having such a hard time to implement mentalray the right way, cause it somehow makes the same (not all, but some of them) mistakes, as the maya renderer does. i guess everyone really wants to see this.

by the way: we are also using xsi at work (and god knows that not everything is running fine there as well!!!) - but - a friend of mine there managed to build a nice translucent shader using a volumetric material which could react to light but is not using any kind of photon mapping which makes it pretty fast. having this kind of material (which is actually the volume material and used to be the raymarcher material in the old soft3d (!)) would make it possible to get pretty close to wax, and if u paint your and "transluceny map" for the surface shader, would even work fine for skin, as you can simulte bones.

i tried a lot with all those volumetric materials in mr for maya, but none of them really seems to react to light as one would expect (especially when it comes to casting shadows!).

Ronny
K-Effects

stunndman

04 April 2003, 10:27 AM

and i think this is also the reason, why they are having such a hard time to implement mentalray the right way, cause it somehow makes the same (not all, but some of them) mistakes, as the maya renderer does. i guess everyone really wants to see this.

who has a hard time to implement mental ray the right way ? - what kind of mistakes ? i don't think mental ray is limited in any way concerning the possibility to implement a BSSRDF shader

it's just AW, Softimage and the other OEM partners of mental images haven't yet bundled an out of the box shader to do the job

obviously there are BSSRDF shaders out there (like the baby in the ad) - it's just that nobody has released anything to the public yet AFAIK

the "mistakes" i've been talking about do not come from mental ray of course. what i was talking about was the thing jemery said: AW is trying to render everything by fake. and because mentalray always tries to be as accurate and close to reality as possible it might be hard to connect those two. that should be no excuse at all!!! just take volumetric lighting. maya creates volumelight by putting a rather strange volumeshader into a predefines shape which depends on the light you are using. i guess to get a close result in mr, the guys at AW (or even mental images) just wrote a shader for mental ray that does the same thing. so there is not really the problem, that mr can't do it, but its programmed to do the same thing as the mayarenderer (the same fake, the same mistakes). thats what i meant!

greetings

ronny

Kabab

04 April 2003, 01:27 PM

But the $64,000 question is why are they doing it like that surely they know the advantages and disadvanatages of both ideals.

playmesumch00ns

04 April 2003, 03:21 PM

I think you're being a little harsh, Jeremy. Who ever bought Maya for its renderer?

Every package has its good and bad points. Softimage had a terrible renderer until it integrated mentalray, and now A|W have gone down the same route with Maya.

There's nothing wrong with faking things, after all CG's all about faking things: as you well know, Renderman's built around the idea of corner-cutting and clever tricks (less so with v11 of course).

I agree that the Maya renderer's got its niggles, but I've always been prepared to spend the time doing a workaround because (with a little planning) Maya already saved me so much time in every other stage of my work. Now it seems A|W have done the sensible thing and intergrated mr. Now they can spend their time making improvements to the things they do best, and leave the rendering up to mental.

Maya Ayanami

04 April 2003, 04:17 AM

well of course faking isn't a bad thing, in fact it is the best aproach expesially for something like this. isn't it weird that maya has such a not very good renderer. just imagine when A|W gets serious about their render engine.
too bad mental images had to be a back stabber and betray that one guy that was once so kind to them(sorry but I dont know his name. I have a very very bad memory). I guess things will be easier once we get maya 5 with mRay 3(I am just guessing).

protohiro

04 April 2003, 05:00 PM

I think people may have misunderstood what Jeremy was saying...I think maya's rendering tools are designed to be as flexible as possible; not to provide lots of push button features like many other renderers (Brazil, FinalRender, etc). The result is that its very difficult for a new user to produce really good effects. But at the same time an advanced user is not limited in any way by the tools. There is ALWAYS going to be a way to do it. I think Mental Ray is actually similar, out of the box its not going to be easy to produce great imagery, but you will never find yourself limited. I have been a mental ray-aholic lately, especially since I figured out how to use the DGS shader.

Maya Ayanami

04 April 2003, 07:32 PM

what is a DGS shader.

and I would have to agree with you. I think that the possibilities are almost endless when using maya. it would make things easier if you knew what every render node did and what you can use it for. using the connection editor the # of ways that you can build a shader is well one hell of a big number. I have seen some very complex shaders just useing procederal textures and some other render nodes to create a compex and small shader that can be almost easily edited. a good example that I have is a shader for an eye. you can change the colors of it really easilly and it looks quite really exept for the veins.

is this kind of what you are saying. or did I wonder to the other side of the tomato.

Stahlberg

04 April 2003, 05:16 AM

Sorry but the possibilities in the Maya renderer are NOT endless, advanced user or no - for instance, Mark Davies of RayDiffuse fame has said he's tired of the limitations of the API. And if he's not an advanced user, then I don't know.

It may look like advanced users can make it work, but don't forget most of them use another renderer. Emmanuel Campin is an exception... anyway isn't it ridiculous to sell a software for thousands of bucks and only A COUPLE FRICKEN PEOPLE ON EARTH can use it to its fullest potential?!
(And yes I do agree that MR seems like the answer, I only wish I had it.)
Sorry, but I'm totally and utterly sick of looking at other people's wonderful GI and SSS renderings.

Why the hell do Vray and Brazil have to drag their asses so much on that Maya port they keep talking about anyway?

[old man dodders off, grumbling to himself...]

GrafOrlok

04 April 2003, 07:27 AM

Hey Steven!

Why don't you use Mental Ray? Is it because it's not in your production pipeline or something. I mean it's free... :shrug:

I totally agree that Maya's renderer isn't "endless". It seams to me that Mental ray is on to something though.:thumbsup: Just wish it was easier to get into.

Stahlberg

04 April 2003, 11:04 AM

It isn't free, not for me anyway. I'm still on 4.0 and can't afford to upgrade to 4.5.

playmesumch00ns

04 April 2003, 11:49 AM

I agree. Maya's rendering API is incredibly limited. Writing shaders is much more complicated than it need be, and if you need to do anything more advanced then you're in for a struggle. A|W seem to have addressed this with Maya 5. but now mentalray's getting close to complete integration, who's going to bother?

GrafOrlok

04 April 2003, 12:05 PM

It isn't free, not for me anyway. I'm still on 4.0 and can't afford to upgrade to 4.5.
Ah..!:sad:

Waters

04 April 2003, 05:43 PM

Cant wait for Maya 5. Having more than one renderer built into a program, or at least available as plugins, makes sense to me. I dont know about anyone else, but it seems very hard to get away from that maya 'look', the renderer is great for some projects, and frustrating for others. Wouldnt it be great to have a pallette of renderers to choose from when doing a project, you could pick the renderer that fits the look you are going for.

Waters

04 April 2003, 05:44 PM

... any chance the new version of mental ray will have a standard sss shader?

thev

04 April 2003, 12:24 PM

Originally posted by Stahlberg
Why the hell do Vray and Brazil have to drag their asses so much on that Maya port they keep talking about anyway?Because, until Maya 5, it was extremely difficult to plug another renderer directly into Maya, and one had to rewrite all of the lights, materials etc. AW say they have extended their renderer API in Maya 5; we have yet to see if it is anywhere near as open and easy to start with as the 3dsmax API.

Best regards,
Vlado

Stahlberg

04 April 2003, 07:01 AM

Makes sense. But then they should stop saying a Maya port is coming, without any more info. It's been like that for years. I think FinalRender do too. And Absolute Character Tools. All the really good stuff. Feels like a conspiracy to taunt me. :)
I've seriously considered switching to Max just for this. bleh

Ckerr812

04 April 2003, 12:00 AM

Comon Mr stahlberg, your stuff is so good you don't even need GI or Sub surface scattering. You've done a great job with the maya renderer IMHO.

I just shutter at how your work would look if you had a renderman team behind you, writing shaders for you wow.. I think the rest of us would just be blown away even more :)

Waters

04 April 2003, 12:19 AM

I dont know, I'd like to see professionals like Stahlberg get their hands dirty with GI and SSS. I think all these new render technologies are amazing, but i dont think the power and potential of many of them has been anywhere near fully- tapped. I cant wait to see what some of these high-end masters do with the new 'stuff' once they get integrated with the maya renderer. Plus.... I'll have a new desktop :p :drool:

jeremybirn

04 April 2003, 05:31 AM

[B]Comon Mr stahlberg, your stuff is so good you don't even need GI or Sub surface scattering.[B]

Funny logic - we could just as well say his work is so good he doesn't need a computer.

To me, the more interesting question is: does the work need the lack of realistic skin to be accepted as art? I mean, take the basic premise of Steven's most recent masterpeice: an under-aged girl in her underwear kneels in front of a snake-like-thing and with wide eyes and an opened mouth reaches up to touch it. If the scene looked as if it had been photographed with a real 13-year-old posing for a photograph or shot on DV, people would have been hesitant to lavish it with such breathless praise. While the work clearly needs the sexy girls to be considered noteworthy, it also needs to be presented in an acceptably artistic context. A final product with the look of airbrushed fantasy art, rather than realistic human flesh, may be the saving grace whose loss would break the artwork.

Of course, I could be wrong. A lot of painters have gone much further in terms of capturing the visceral presence of human flesh ,while still presenting a unique artistic vision. I wouldn't want to predict that anyone couldn't advance in his work, especially when technological advances in this decade will make it harder to stay ahead of the babes being produced for the latest video games, but just wanted to raise the issue.

-jeremy

PS- On the issue of getting Maya 4.5, it seems a little late for that, with Maya 5 coming so soon.

playmesumch00ns

04 April 2003, 08:25 AM

Viva la NPR I say. The closer we get to photorealism at the click of a button, the more important style becomes. "skylighting" was cutting edge once, as were lens flares. :)

Kabab

04 April 2003, 10:07 AM

I would just like to note that this is an excellent discusion !!

Maya Ayanami

04 April 2003, 03:04 AM

you know since Maya 5 comes with Mental Ray 3.something and Mental Ray is what, like $3,000, and isnt maya complete about the same. so if you buy maya 5 complete wouldn't it be like you are getting maya for free(boo yea) and are buying onle the renderer or the other way around.

or just think of that if you buy whatever Maya 5 then you are getting a major $3,000 discount well sort of.

and I have no idea what tis has to do with the discussion.

Ckerr812

04 April 2003, 05:06 PM

Well, let me explain what I mean a bit about GI and SSS. To me I think Mr.Stahlbergs work has an airbrushed looked to it, giving it a playboy soft look (fantasy) which makes it so great. (Same reson why soap opera's use to put vasoline on the camera lenses).

Now, with GI and SSS, it always personally just frustrates me of how long it takes to tweak things. With the Maya renderer using the IPR is quick and dirty, and I don't have to sit there and wait to see what a lighting tweak is or how a certain colour scheme works. Personally though I am the type of artist that just starts off with scribbles, and I just tweak and tweak until I am happy.

With GI and SSS, I do that, and it takes me ages to do such little things, like tweak the number of photons, and so on that it takes away the artist aspect, and makes you think technically.

Then again if I was a technical director I would really suck at it, because I am not very technically minded and I think that GI is aimed at lighting TD's more then the artists, which is frustrating.

Soon as puters get faster, it will bring down the wait time, but as it is now, it's to numbers based and Technical in my opinion.

That's what I love about maya (and the Maya renderer) is that it is geared towards instant feedback, and lets you stay in the creative state of mind in my opnion.

protohiro

04 April 2003, 05:34 PM

I get really irritated when people say things like "GI takes the art out of CG" or even that non-photorealistic rendering is the only way to preserve the art. I studied cinematography in school, and I never felt that just because in real life light is accurately simulated there's no art to it. Do you think that photographers or cinematographers aren't artists? I think GI makes it real easy to make a shot that looks realistic. But it doesn't make it any easier to make it look good.

I agree that slow render times are a drag though. What I want is a real time GI render, so I can move lights around and tweak colors in real time and get feed back. Although, I don't think this is really necessary, or that plugging in numbers and waiting for test renders is ALL that technical and hampering for the art. Its not all that different from studio photography, pluging in numbers, moving strobes a little bit, taking a polariod, waiting five minutes for it to develop, then looking at, it, making a few more tweaks, and then doing it again. Worse though is shooting in the field (I like to take 4x5s). You have to take a meter reading, do a little bit of math in your head, bracket the shot and then hope the exposure is right.

In the end, the tool does not define the art. I think GI is really just a powerful new tool in the arsenal and people are still just enamored of how cool it is. Just like 2d morphs and lens flares people will get over the novelty and just put it into the drawer and focus on the output, not the process.

Ckerr812

04 April 2003, 05:55 PM

hmmm... I fail to see were anybody said that Gi takes the art out of CG. I don't think you understood my post.

What takes the art out of it is clicking the button, and waiting for 10 minutes to see what you did. Were as all other art mediums you get instant feedback which keeps your brain thinking creativly, and keeps you focused.

Off course, that's why people need to compinsate for this by having Modeling teams, Texturing teams, lighting teams, compositing and so on with huge projects, because then the modelers don't worry about Lighting, the Animators don't worry about compositing and so on and so forth.

Technically minded people are the best artists of all, but are not always the most creative people.

Of course I am probably getting to theoretical, but the key to maya's success is it keeps you thinking on the right side of the brain.

jeremybirn

04 April 2003, 06:16 PM

To clarify my last post on this thread: I was talking specifically about Steven Stahlburg's work when I said it was dependent on the airbrushed, traditional look of fantasy art for much of its artistic appeal.

I would certainly never say that working with a broader range of tools hurts 3D art in general. In fact, I find it kindof funny when people try to justify their technical and pragmatic production decisions in broad terms of art theory, because they are so likely to make different decisions next year when they work on a different project, or with different hardware and software. I certainly am willing to adopt different tools whenever they seem effective and fit into the schedule. (Of course, I work as a TD, so some people don't consider me an artist anymore...)

-jeremy

Ckerr812

04 April 2003, 06:48 PM

Well as you can tell I am not the best writer in the world.

I was trying to distinguish the difference between a technical artist and a fine artist.

Not that one is an artist and the other isn't , that would be just silly ;)

Ckerr812

04 April 2003, 06:54 PM

For example...and correct me if I am wrong.

Technical artists would be mainly, Chracter TD's/Rigging, Scripting/programming, Rendering, Lighting TD's, and on the R and D teams.

Were as a fine artist, would be Storyboard/Concept, modeling, Texturing, Animation, art direction .

Artists, YES...
To avoid confusion, the word 'craftsman' was invented long ago...

Atwooki

Maya Ayanami

04 April 2003, 03:33 AM

hmm. I only get upset(in this gereral topic) when other people who have no experience in cg and I mean all computer graphic arts dont't see us as artist at all. I am not saying that this is true to everyone but it seems to me that to other people see cg wok(2D and 3D) as just some sort of special effect or someting like that, and the word "art" never even comes within a mile of their mind while thinking about cg. I think that 3D is the hardest of all of the art catagories because you "have" to make everthing, all of the objects, shaders, textures, lights, and such. but for all of this extra stuff you also have the ability to change any thing you want. like in photograpy, if your subject is a mountain, the photographer can't move the mountain or even change the direction the light is coming from but in cg you can even change the location of that mountain and everything else. you can even put another planet in the sky.

woo.. there I think I said too much.

Maya Ayanami

04 April 2003, 03:42 AM

have you guys seen that V8 Splash comercial. it totaly looked like it has some sss on it. the cg models looked exactly like the real juice.
very cool. I would like to know witch renderer they used for that

jeremybirn

04 April 2003, 01:08 AM

Originally posted by Ckerr812
For example...and correct me if I am wrong.

Technical artists would be mainly, Chracter TD's/Rigging, Scripting/programming, Rendering, Lighting TD's, and on the R and D teams.

Were as a fine artist, would be Storyboard/Concept, modeling, Texturing, Animation, art direction .

And if your good at both....then you got it made :)

Most production people in creative positions have a mix of both technical and artistic skills, and there are a lot more than 2 shades in the gradient running between "how technical is your job" and "how artistic is your job." Even within any department, there are always more technical modelers who write MEL scripts to automate portions of their work and modelers who have a sculpting background and work some of thier concepts out in clay before they try them on a computer.

You list modeling among the more creative jobs, and it can be. And yet, at most studios the modelers are building 3D models based on approved 2D or 3D artwork (drawings or sculptures) that has already been made by the art department. They are putting an existing design into the computer, and then sometimes changing it in ways that are requested when it is reviewed, but they aren't usually designing something new like the texture painters or animators or lighters who work after them.

-jeremy

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